The Story Continues

Captain's Blog Stardate 92403.86

It's finally here! Delta Rising has arrived in all its glory and here is my first impression... well second impression because we've been talking about this for weeks. I've been playing through the story on Elite difficulty and overall it's not too bad. The enemies are a lot tougher but I'm glad I can manage. Although the Vaadwaur are ANNOYING!!

I have to be honest, they are my new favorite enemy. They're a challenge, they're unique, they're everything evil. Let's not forget that [REDACTED] is also making things harder for us when facing the Vaadwaur. Sorry, you're going to have to play through the story to find out what I'm talking about. No spoilers here!

It's a lot of fun seeing some of the Voyager crew back in action and joining them on missions. It makes me wish they could have gotten everyone from Voyager to reprise their roles. As for the story itself, I'm enjoying it. It gets better and better which makes me excited for the conclusion which I hope will be epic.

The one problem is that Cryptic should have done a better job with the experience given from these missions. Either increase the experience or give us more missions. Here's what I'm guessing. Cryptic assumed we would not only play through the story but also play missions in the PvE queue to level. Frankly, I would have preferred the story be the primary means of leveling.

One last thing I want to talk about and it's the Kobali home world. The map looks really cool and it has its own side-story which I'm enjoying immensely. You learn about the Kobali and Vaadwaura war, have some fun ground combat, and get to enjoy a compelling yet simple story. I think they did an excellent job with this. Possibly even better than the main Delta story.

What do you think about the stories being told in Delta Rising? Do you enjoy them? Is it a good continuation to the STO plot? Should there be more? Less? Comment as you see fit!

Written by Attilio on October 19, 2014 at 10:14 pm

Comments

Warburton1881(Member) said...October 20, 2014 at 02:53 am

I'm enjoying the Delta Quadrant immensely. Te missions are tough enough to be interesting, but not so hard that you can't complete them. What I really like are the rewardS. A Purple Mk XIII beam beats the heck out of a Green Sensors Console. Speaking of consoles, the ones being given as rewards are some of the most popular (and useful) ones in the game, and their level is high enough to make them worth going after.

There is a nice mix of space combat, ground combat and diplomatic missions, so you can easily find missions you like to play. Even the inevitable bugs weren't as bad as on some of Cryptic's launches, and so far there haven't been any that you can't work around one way or another.

I also like the job that the guest stars are doing. A couple of the voice-over actors on the last story set were pretty annoying in my opinion. The current ones are right in character and sound like their really speaking to you, not just reading lines like a couple of their predecessors.

I'm only up to level 54, so I have a lot more missions to do before I get to the end, but I'm really enjoying what I've seen so far.

The Levelling is indeed a little odd. I know of at least one player, who managed to get to Level 60 within 24 hours be only using the PvE queues, managed to master 4 Starships and apparently got 15 Specialization points in the process.

Maybe there was an "unintended feature" involved, I don't know. But I agree, that the Story line should have been the primary source of experience.

As for Kobali Prime, I enjoy it as well. There is one annoying thing though. It is a real bugger, when you are on Kobali, returning to the General to get a new mission only to learn that you need to pass to more levels to get the next one.

Other than that, the "Delta Rising" expansion is a very pleasant surprise. I was especially impressed by the server stability upon its release. I expected to be sorted into a Login queue, just like it happend back with "Legacy of Romulus". But there were no problems with that.

Also, I like the new Captain Specialization and I'm wondering, when Cryptic is issuing the Re-Specialization Tokens. I'm sure, I'm not the only who made a poor choice there. Although, seeing a Scimitar making a Barrel roll is hilarious. ;)

So far, I love it. I love the episodes and the new STF. Only gripe is that now they have made it SOOO hard. I thought I remembered seeing teh 3 levels of STF?
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Normal -then to adv (comparible to elite) and a new elite? but right now i havent completed a advanced level stf.If anyone has completed it I would live to hear about the new tactics for Borg infected advanced!

Enjoying the story missions when I get to them. My only criticism like others have said is that you can't level just by finishing episodes. I do like how Kobali prime is played out with progressing across the map as you level.

The stories should have been the primary means of leveling, I agree.
The story is good, it has me excited to see what's next.

The new stf are challenging, I've only done ISA and died once. So it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Tactics I used where simple, take out the spheres surrounding the first cube, destroy cube and the rest plays out like ISE. If anyone on the team has crowd control such as Gravity Well, then have them use it on the spheres while you're trying to destroy the nanite transformer. This is of course if your team has low dps.

All around great expansion and as TP mentioned, SURPRISED that the login didn't fail and the servers didn't crash lol.